↳ Exhibitions

Michael Freeman Badour at Roberta Pelan

September 6, 2016

Artist: Michael Freeman Badour

Exhibition title: Repeaters

Venue: Roberta Pelan, Toronto, Canada

Date: August 6 – September 11, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Roberta Pelan

Michael Freeman Badour (b. 1987) received a BFA from the OCADU in 2014 and was awarded the Drawing and Painting medal. Recent exhibitions include Heatsink, Topless Projects, New York; Baker’s Dozen, CK2 Gallery, New York; SkyLink, http:// skylink.work/, Toronto; and What year is it?,http://whatyearisit.space/, Toronto. Since 2014 Badour has co-run Carrier Arts, a nomadic exhibition platform which aims to recontextualize art with experimental programming in private, public and online spaces. Badour is a Canadian-Irish citizen and currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

When you’re painting at 220 PPI (pixels per inch) you don’t need assistants. When you’re painting with resolution you’re the repeater. It wouldn’t be an effective use of time to constantly repeat what you want to your helper, correcting them, adjusting their strokes. Besides, that’s the projector’s job. It remembers your last thought with a beam of precision, saying it aloud again and again until you’ve changed your mind, or until the screensaver comes on. Painting with resolution is what we’ve always done from representation to abstraction. The only difference is that now we describe what we see in a coldly nuanced fashion, with numbers.

In reality the repeater is more like an amnesiac broken-telephone player, dropping pixels and distorting data. The repeated signal, the repeated image, the copying and pasting of compressed data, eventually loses the likeness of its origin file and what we’re left with is the artifact of communication. A signal frozen in space that bears all the scars of dissemination.